By Chris Hampson, NBC News Director of Foreign News

LONDON – I watched a man die on television last night.

Not in some Hollywood crime mini-series, but for real.

He sat on a sofa, drank a cup of barbiturates and, quite deliberately, let his life ebb away.

His last act on this earth was to snore loudly, as he fell into the deepest sleep a human can ever have, the one from which you never wake up.

Sitting awkwardly by his side was his loyal wife of 40 years, going along with her husband’s last wish to finish his life while he was still able. You could tell that inside she was screaming.

This was assisted suicide, Swiss-style, and the BBC aired it as part of a moving – and highly-controversial – debate on the so-called “right to die.”

The man, a 71-year-old Briton called Peter Smedley, had motor neurone disease and chose to kill himself rather than suffer what he saw as an awful, lingering death.

I have been with people shortly before they died, and I have seen many bodies shortly after. The first is a consequence of watching family and friends grow older; the second the hazard of being a journalist.

But this was the first time I’d been witness to the moment when a person passes from life to death. That it was by choice, made it even harder to watch. I admit to tears rolling down my face.

The debate about the right to end one’s own life is one of the most fundamental of any issues. It is proscribed in some religions, and, in most countries, by law.

In Europe, only the Netherlands and Belgium make exceptions for residents.

Similarly, in the United States only three states allow physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, Montana, Oregon and Washington. 

In most places, and in the U.K., you run the risk of prosecution – and possibly prison – if you help a loved one to take his or her own life.

So a curious branch of the tourist industry has opened up, where those who want or need help to kill themselves travel to a house on an industrial estate just outside Zurich. The authorities won’t allow it in a residential area.

Switzerland has permitted assisted suicide under certain criteria since 1940. Those who want to take the final step can make their last journey to the Dignitas clinic there and for a fee, they offer what they call a “dignified death,” medically-supervised, counseled, and legal.

So it was to Dignitas that Peter Smedley traveled, and was filmed ending his life just a few days before Christmas last year. He would have preferred to die at home, but that choice was not open to him.

It was hard to watch, more so because, for much of my life, I have lived with the painful knowledge that my own grandfather killed himself. It was a story whispered to me as a teenager by my mother.  My father never spoke to me about it, but in all his conversations about his own father he spoke of a decent, upstanding man – someone who, these days, we’d say had a strong “moral compass.”

One night, 80 years ago, he left his wife asleep in bed, went down the stairs, and quietly took his life by his own hand.
He was alone, and told no-one.  He left only a note, which I found a couple of years ago in an archived newspaper report of his death. It makes hard reading.

It tells of a man struggling with nerves and a painful illness, who had recently lost his only daughter. He was worried for his job. A doctor had diagnosed “neurasthenia” – a condition no longer in scientific use – “exhaustion of the nervous system.”

“My nerves are all shaking as I am writing this,” he says in his final words to his wife and two sons.  “This will break your heart, and I have tried not to do it, but I am a beaten man.”

The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide while of “unsound mind.”  But he added kindly: “Instead of saying anything against his memory, one ought to feel very sorry he has been impelled to do this…I expect he thought it was the best way to end his trouble.”
These days my grandfather would likely have lived.  His medical condition could have been treated and his mental state – depression – correctly diagnosed and addressed. I like to think he would have wanted to live, and I could have met him.

But even with modern medicines and treatment, there are those today for whom life seems to lose its worth. Do they, like my grandfather did, have the right to end it? 

Should their loved ones face punishment if they help? Must they die alone? Must they die at all?

For Peter Smedley there was only one answer.

And so, as snow fell and covered the distant Alps beyond, he thanked his wife and those helping him to die, and drank from a plastic cup in a clinic far from home.

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